You are a multi-talented composer who seems to have found the balance between personal artist projects and collaborative media projects. How do you balance expressing your own voice and meeting the demands of a director and project?

I see the artist projects as a personal outlet and free playground, whereas the film work is much more of a collaboration within a team to tell the story on screen. They are two different mindsets, where I occasionally get to blur the lines, especially if a director has picked up on my artist work. I really enjoy when the lines blur, but also take care to recognize both worlds. I guess I try to separate it as the film industry and then the music industry.

You often speak about the duality between classical and electronica—are there specific techniques you bring over from classical into electronic composition, or vice versa?

I think technically and stylistically there are ways of working in both languages that cross over really well, especially in terms of mixing and production techniques. It’s great to look at an instrument objectively and ask yourself how to make a noise out of it, but I equally love more traditional scoring methods of working out structures and using rigid classical techniques in orchestration.

You have mentioned the presence of a live audience being terrifying but irreplaceable. What have you learned about yourself as a performer through that discomfort? What drives you to continue to perform?

I improvise live, as being classically trained I was always terrified of making wrong notes. I am curious about rooms, different audiences—so many different parameters that can affect a live experience—and it is never the same twice, which for me makes it a really addictive process, not to mention the dopamine hit after the nerves subside. It is terrifying to bare yourself onstage, but it’s about as organic an experience as we can have in a digitally consumed world.

You’ve reworked music by artists like James Heather, Poppy Ackroyd, and Sergio Díaz de Rojas. What do you look for when you decide a track is worth reinventing? And how do you balance honoring the original with reshaping it into your own language?

A lot of tracks I rework are born through conversation and friendship. I have been asked a lot and I really enjoy it. I try to give a track I am reworking the emotional response of what I am feeling at the time, as if I am writing one of my own tracks but with the stems at the forefront of that creative process. I hope in that way it helps me stay true to myself as an artist with the part I create, but also with the other artist’s work still very much considered at the forefront. I hope that most of these tracks always feel like they have two voices. 🙂

In Lucid Distance you recorded the first-ever music inside the European Space Agency’s Large European Acoustic Facility—a space designed for satellites, not music. How did that unusual acoustic environment reshape your ideas about sound and silence, and did it influence the record in a way you didn’t anticipate?

Before I got there, I didn’t know what to expect, and it felt like a real sonic experiment, but I was excited that it was the largest reverb chamber in Europe and thought at worst it would add a bigger backdrop and the sense of distance and reaching in I was searching for. But then I was excited to be able to bring the distance into the foreground and use the room as instruments. I knew it would add a certain wash to the record, but I didn’t know until I was there that I would have to ride the saturation levels or that there were specific resonant frequencies of the room that gave these drones underneath everything, so yes, it definitely shaped the record completely. It’s definitely the most interesting acoustic experience I have ever had. Literally a cough in the room would just build and build, so I had to be so still. I am still nervous about the record coming out in November, as it was such a big experiment, but I really hope that it encourages more composers reading this to give something new a go!

You’ve worked repeatedly with artists like Mara Simpson, Her Ensemble, and others over the years. How do long-term collaborations shape your music, and do these ongoing relationships influence the way you approach new projects or reworks?

Collaboration is a really important part of my music career. It helps challenge ideas, ways of doing things, and growth together through conversation and music. I love that I have been able to work with brilliant people multiple times and get to know different artists and performers and what they can give to music that I can’t, and I hope to continue to share experiences, as even as a solo artist or film composer it’s not without a village of industry people and friends that things happen. 🙂

Interview by Jocelyn Scofield

Check out Alexandra’s Directory Page Here!